Annie Kilburn

Annie did not sleep. After lying a long time awake she took some of the

tonic that Dr. Morrell had left her, upon the chance that it might quiet

her; but it did no good. She dressed herself, and sat by the window till

morning.

The breaking day showed her purposes grotesque and monstrous. The revulsion

that must come, came with a tide that swept before it all prepossessions,

all affections. It seemed as if the child, still asleep in her crib, had

heard what she said, and would help to hold her to her word.

She choked down a crust of bread with the coffee she drank at breakfast,

and instead of romping with Idella at her bath, she dressed the little one

silently, and sent her out to Mrs. Bolton. Then she sat down again in the

sort of daze in which she had spent the night, and as the day passed, her

revolt from what she had pledged herself to do mounted and mounted. It was

like the sort of woman she was, not to think of any withdrawal from her

pledges; they were all the more sacred with her because they had been

purely voluntary, insistent; the fact that they had been refused made them

the more obligatory.

She thought some one would come to break in upon the heavy monotony of the

time; she expected Ralph or Ellen, or at least Lyra; but she only saw Mrs.

Bolton, and heard her about her work. Sometimes the child stole back from

the kitchen or the barn, and peeped in upon her with a roguish expectance

which her gloomy stare defeated, and then it ran off again.

She lay down in the afternoon and tried to sleep; but her brain was

inexorably alert, and she lay making inventory of all the pleasant things

she was to leave for that ugly fate she had insisted on. A swarm of fancies

gave every detail of the parting dramatic intensity. Amidst the poignancy

of her regrets, her shame for her recreancy was sharper still.

By night she could bear it no longer. It was Dr. Morrell's custom to come

nearly every night; but she was afraid, because he had walked home with her

from the meeting the night before, he might not come now, and she sent for

him. It was in quality of medicine-man, as well as physician, that she

wished to see him; she meant to tell him all that had passed with Mr. Peck;

and this was perfectly easy in the interview she forecast; but at the sound

of his buggy wheels in the lane a thought came that seemed to forbid her

even to speak of Mr. Peck to him. For the first time it occurred to her

that the minister might have inferred a meaning from her eagerness and

persistence infinitely more preposterous than even the preposterous letter

of her words. A number of little proofs of the conjecture flashed upon her:

his anxiety to get away from her, his refusal to let her believe in her own

constancy of purpose, his moments of bewilderment and dismay. It needed

nothing but this to add the touch of intolerable absurdity to the horror

of the whole affair, and to snatch the last hope of help from her.